So, Plex is great at delivering media and their belonging subtitles. It works most of the time. Sometimes the subtitles are being burned in. Burning in the subtitles is totally fine when it really has to be done, but sometimes it is doing it unnecessarily (when it can be natively played or converted to another text format)
One example is ASS subtitles in the android client. Having Burn Subtitles: Automatic will burn them. Changing the setting to Only Image Formats will now natively play them. Fine one might think, change that setting and itâs all cool further on. But, this will now cause otherwise compatible picture based subtitles to now be burned in.
Another scenario where Automatic is lacking is the web player. ASS subtitles here again. Will play them just fine with the setting set to Only Image Formats, but will burn them when the setting is on the default Automatic
I think there should be a fourth option. Burn Subtitles: Avoid at all costs. And I think it should be the default. Burning subtitles require a lot of CPU power and if it is avoidable, I would prefer it to be avoided.
What are your opinions on this? Is there any reason to burn the subtitles instead of natively play them that I have missed?
I donât either, but if something works properly when taken off automatic, and not when automatic is on, then that would logically seem to point to a problem.
Automatic should help ensure that transcoding subtitles is only used when absolutely required.
transcoding the subtitle = converting the subtitle to a format the client can play without having to transcode the video
burning subtitle = transcodes the video and adds the subtitles on the video itself
You see, transcoding (converting) the subtitle does not always mean the video has to be transcoded.
I agree with MasterIroh.
I donât want my - some valuable - videos to be forever marked with Plex burned subtitles. I want to control subtitle display myself - size, colour, vertical position. That is why I use external ASS on all my movies.
I use the Windows store player on my PC. It did not play internal SRTâs properly. So I went through a long process of separating internal SRTâs, and converting them to ASS. I use them externally and all is fine.
A couple of days ago I bought a new NVIDIA Shield TV for our family TV - updated to Android 8 and Shield âexperienceâ 7.1.
Today I tried to play a movie, and the ASS subtitles did not show at all.
The burning setting is in Automatic in the Chrome server, and on the Android TV player also.
Just to try, I converted the ASS on one movie to SRT (external), and it played OK.
Searching for answers to why the Shield Plex player does not play ASS, I ran into this thread. I am really upset to read that on Auto, the ASS will be burned in. I checked the movie file, and indeed, there are some bits and pieces burned in as I was testing. But strangely enough, they did not show when I played the movie the first time round on the Shield.
The bottom line - I donât want any subtitles to be burned to any video at all cost. I am happy to convert subtitles myself externally, if needed. SubEdit is easy to work with.
I had no idea that Android does not support ASS subtitles, and that Plex will burn them in. How does one find out these things? Is there a spec sheet for Plex on Android TV somewhere in the support section?Luckily only one of my video files has been damaged.
You can find out alot of stuff with Tautulli. It gives detailed information about streams on your server and information about many other things. It also tells you when subtitles are burned or converted.
Thanks for the suggestion, but it sounds pretty complex. To get this to work I need to install Python. Donât like to have so much stuff on my PC for a simple task.
Is there any other way - from within the Plex server - to monitor what is going on?
That would be a very good news. Not knowing the internals of Plex servers, I thought it may burn them into the original file.
So why is the original poster so concerned about it? The stress on the CPU?
I got alarmed and drawn into this thread when looking for answers to my problems with my new Shield TV box. I use ASS subtitles exclusively.
Yes. Burning subtitles requires Plex to transcode the video, which is CPU intensive. If youâre using a lower power CPU this can cause problems since the CPU may not be able to keep up (pausing, buffering, etc). Hardware Accelerated Transcoding helps (Plex Pass required), but there are cases where Plex still falls back to using the CPU.
Understandable. Iâll check out your other thread & post any Shield comments there (so not to hijack this thread from OP).
FYI, going back a bit in this thread, Tautulli is very useful. The install is straightforward and the CPU load is minimal. I run Tautulli on a Synology DS918+ which has a Celeron CPU. It uses 0.05% CPU and 25 MB RAM. As @MasterIroh mentions, the Activity page is much better than Plexâs Status â Now Playing page (via Plex Web). A lot of other good info such as viewing history by user and viewing media info for an entire library (video container, video & audio codecs, etc). Even a newsletter which e-mails your users with new movie additions. Definitely worth a couple of hours to check it out. If you donât like it you can always uninstall and no harm done.
This is effecting sync. I have no option to NOT burn subtitles when synching media to my iPad. The only option i have right now is to remove the subtitles from the file itself which seems wrong.
Negative.
Burning and Transcoding mean the same thing.
Plex doesnât convert a sub file in a transcode while handing off the video stream in direct play.
Youâve been mis-informed.
About 10 seconds in an OCR Session turning PGS/VOB subs into UTF-8s will clearly show - thatâs impossible to do on the fly.
Plex is Burning those PGS/VOB subs into the video stream - in that Transcode.
In the meantime you can set your server to block any transcoding⊠admittedly thatâll go much further than what is described in this thread but it should be covering your use case as well (see JuiceWSAâs post explaining the link between transcoding and burning-in the subtitle).
Settings > Server > Transcoder > Disable video stream transcoding
(this requires Plex Media Server 1.18.5 or newer)
I think Iâve been reading somewhere in the forum that they want to look into giving a better feedback / error message. But generally speaking this is what you get:
Client doesnât support your subtitles (requesting them to be burned in)
Plex Media Server is set to avoid transcoding / burning in subtitles at all cost and declines to âcomplyâ
